Sunday, 21 October 2012

One thing at a time I – Go Back to the Start.

Home is a concept with
special meaning for us all. I say “concept” and not “reality” (though the two
are not always so easily divided) because it is important to draw attention to
the cognitive, imagined dimension. To focus on the imagined dimension of home
is to foreground the fact that home is equally made in the spaces of the mind
as it is in physical spaces. However, this narrowing must come with a
qualification: even while the individual (whether alone or as a member of a
family or other community unit) is responsible for an individual concept of
home his/her acts of imagination are as within a matrix of social and cultural
influences. The home ideas of others, especially those with the privileges of
dominant representation overlap and resonate on each other and on our own. Our
concepts, of home or otherwise, are rarely wholly original and free from the
fragments of others. We make our homes in the shadows of ideas cast by others
as they make theirs in ours.

Home has
always felt like an act for me. Perhaps this is because I moved away from my
original domicile at the relatively early age of sixteen. I metaphorically
wandered for several years until I stumbled on an academic path that would
equip me with the intellectual tools necessary for apprehending my immediate
reality. I gained home making narratives of others, particularly those of local
Bundjalung Aborigines. They taught me that the places on which social and
cultural institutions had been placed had a longer history and the very soil
itself possessed memories of a belonging based on something other than colonization
and empire building. Another concept of significant resonance to me was a Koori
sense of time in which the past persists into the present. Anglo-sphere
colonial narratives, rooted in traditions of documented lineage, force time
into a narrow, linear, consecutive idea giving primacy to the knowledges that
came before. Thus allowing an inhabited land to be declared terra nullius.

Being in
a space, performing life over time creates place. The rhythm and repetition of
the familiar and the strange to the point that it becomes familiar are the
actions of making home. Where we place ourselves is where we make home. A
concept of self is performed constantly always becoming in the milieu of space,
place and people. Rarely do we have the opportunity to properly reflect on this
process and it is unusual for many to perform explicitly, with purpose and
consciousness. Which is not to devalue unconscious participation, since to do
so merely buys into the oppressive language of binaries established by others
for specific colonizing purposes. Perhaps it is more accurate to say we all
possess differing degrees to which we feel “at home” so that the experience for
some appears entirely natural and unquestioned (although it is not, it has in
fact become that way through performances executed without friction from
institutions of authority.) For others, such as myself, being at home is a
deliberate act based on calculation and analysis.

This
latter type of becoming at home faces the criticism, usually in the form of
anti-intellectual interjection, as a kind of cynical artifice. To be obstinate,
one could rightly claim that “natural” belonging is equally calculated as a
person in possession of such feeling has been created and creates him/herself
in a context conducive to prosperity. This is a position arrived at in order to
perpetuate certain types of social and cultural hegemony, again not inherently
negative yet nevertheless real. For
those not positioned within this center, belonging and home must be constructed
along different lines and so we return to the explicit performativity mentioned
above.

Relocating
to Japan required a
sacrifice of the home cache that I had created over time in Australia. On a
molecular level, it is unquestionable that the space of my former home and I
are interconnected. Yet distance, both temporal and spatial, combined with
other resonances such as relationship, food and ceremony in a different space have
changed the quality of that feeling to such an extent that the place to which I
refer to above persists only as memory. Even as I reside within the same
cartographical coordinates, time, people and the world have moved on. The place
has changed as much as I have and I was not there to see it.

It took
considerable time for me to send out tender shoots of belonging into the social
and cultural of earth of my new home in Japan. Naturally, I experienced
various symptoms of culture shock. More accurately, I experienced cultural
dislocation. The key strategy for opening up a dialectics of becoming between
personal identity and a new landscape was that of language acquisition. Each
new word, inflection and exchange between me and the locals was a branching
out, a fixing of me in this new place. As my proficiency increased so did my
sense of belonging. What had simply been unfiltered linguistic noise was now a
tapestry of words defining place, time and the flavour of the place I lived. I
no longer required the cognitive constructs of gaijin that I had naively relied on in the past, since I possessed
the power of language. I became able to deconstruct in real time, based on
experiences in the every day present the internal construction of Japan based on
foreign knowledges and compounded by those gaijin
unable, unwilling and uninterested in learning how to belong.

This
resulted in a profound life change. After all, as I daily became more of this
place in terms of a feeling of belonging, so too was I in a sense, becoming
Japanese. Before proceeding, a cautionary note. This is a complex topic and I
speak only from my own personal experience. I want to make it explicit that I
am originally of the post-Imperial Anglosphere, that is, I am originally a
monolingual, white Australian. This is important and although I only touch on
it here I will write about it in an upcoming piece on the problematics of “authenticity”.
When I say, “becoming Japanese” I do not intend the phrase to mean that I
deliberately adopt behaviours and practices in order to be perceived as
authentically Japanese. Instead, I refer to an ongoing process in which daily
life, lived with reflexivity and curiosity produces countless opportunities to
apprehend and comprehend cultural complexities of a host nation as an
immigrant. As I undo my preconceptions of the world and myself so too do I
create a field of belonging, a Japanese version of myself.

In this
regard, my Japanese-ness does not require legitimation or validation. It may be
judged and evaluated but the aim is and was never to slide myself into a
popular or accepted, local or foreign construct of being Japanese. It is an
intimate, subtle and reflexive personal expression. It is not, however, free
from moments of awkwardness, shame and misunderstanding. But then again, life
was like that before I ever came to Japan.

One of
my greatest disappointments in Japan
is the way that the majority of voices have constructed the interstitial
migrant-becoming-Japanese in such limited terms. There remains an undercurrent
of transience and distrust relating to issues of authenticity. A linguistic
divide functions as a cognitive divide. Within the parameters of this
construct, Japan
can only ever be negatively deconstructed. The irony being that the
deconstructers frequently rely on fixed, romanticized constructs of distant, pseudo
perfect homelands. In other words, they render the complexity of the original
home to the same sort of fixed, fetishised knowledge that they possess on Japan and engage
in a lopsided version of the glass bead game whereby the odds are stacked
against the society they chose to be in and choose not to belong to.